JayB

Why use the term "Energy Independence" then, instead of a more accurate expression?

I think that in a world of competing demands, you have to rank your priorities and make an effort to live in a manner that's as consistent with them as possible. This doesn't happen automatically, and having a tangible goal for climbing - just like staying in shape by setting a goal of jogging X-miles per week - is one way to try to insure that climbing gets the place that it deserves in your life. "Days climbing" is also probably shorthand for "not forsaking everything that climbing symbolizes to the tyranny of everyday minutia." I imagine that most people just use the "daymeter" to keep track of how well they were able to integrate this particular priority into their lives. Having said that, I've never kept track of the number of days that I've climbed in a given year. I have more outdoor hobbies than I could possibly pursue intensely all at once, so I've just gone with the flow. Less climbing has always just meant more of something else that I enjoy just as much.

By "Energy Independence" do you mean a diverse and secure energy-supply that doesn't expose the country to economic or geopolitical risks - or are you literally talking about a policy whereby we reject the use of "foreign energy," for philosophical reasons, even when it makes neither economic nor political sense to do so? No LNG or Uranium from Australia, no oil from Mexico, etc.

Something for SC to be thankful for...

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#2) Der Spiegel. "Hooray! We're Capitulating." http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,462149,00.html "The controversy over the 12 Muhammad cartoons that were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 and led to worldwide protests and unrest among Muslims was merely a taste of what is to come, a dress rehearsal for the kinds of disputes Europe can expect to face in the future if it does not rethink its current policy of appeasement. As was the case in the 1930s, when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed in the interest of peace under the Munich Agreement -- a move that ultimately did nothing to prevent World War II -- Europeans today also believe that an adversary, seemingly invincible due to a preference for death over life, can be mollified by good behavior, concessions and submission. All the Europeans can hope to gain in this asymmetric conflict is a temporary reprieve, a honeymoon period that could last 10, 20, or maybe even 50 years. Anyone on death row breathes a sigh of relief when his execution is postponed to some indefinite time in the future. The uproar over the Muhammad cartoons was symptomatic precisely because what triggered it was so insignificant. The drawings themselves were unbelievably harmless. Freedom of expression in conformity with Shariah It took two weeks for "spontaneous" protests to begin. On Oct. 14, 2005, 3,000 Muslims staged a demonstration on Copenhagen's town hall square after Friday prayers. In a letter to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ambassadors from 11 Islamic countries demanded that he take the "necessary steps" to avert an abuse of Islam. Rasmussen responded that it was not his responsibility to discipline journalists, and he refused to schedule a meeting with the irate ambassadors. The Egyptian foreign minister got the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) involved soon after. The OIC had already made clear what it wanted in its "Declaration of Human Rights in Islam" in 1990: "All have the right to freely express their opinions in a manner that does not run counter to Shariah law." In essence, what the OIC wanted was to compel Western nations to bring their form of freedom of expression into conformity with Shariah law. Then a delegation of Danish Muslims traveled to the Muslim world, carrying a folder with the 12 cartoons from Jyllands-Posten, as well as of three significantly more provocative drawings in their luggage. The three drawings portrayed the Prophet as a pedophile devil, with pigs' ears and having sex with a dog. Where the bonus material came from and how it found its way into the documentation remains unclear to this day. But clearly someone was interested in generating the appropriate reaction. Newspapers in Arab countries promptly wrote that the Danish media had portrayed Muhammad as a pig, the original 12 cartoons magically turned into 120 drawings, and the Danish government was accused of being behind the whole thing. The West has values worth defending. Doesn't it? European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels on Jan. 30, 2006 to discuss the crisis. Some believed that Denmark had missed its chance to resolve the conflict on its own. The foreign minister of Luxembourg wasn't just speaking for his own country when he said that the entire affair was "more a Danish than a European problem." The Austrian foreign minister went even further when she said: "statements and actions that degrade a religion in an offensive way should be clearly condemned." Even the Americans abandoned their Danish allies. During the course of a single day, three State Department spokesmen used adjectives like "unacceptable," "offensive" and "objectionable." Muslims got the message. A year ago on Feb. 3, 2006, a "Day of Anger" was proclaimed. Across the Muslim world, the Muhammad cartoons were the focus of Friday prayers. Millions of Muslims who couldn't even locate Denmark on a map demonstrated against these insults to the Prophet, incited by their imams. The embassies of Denmark and Norway were set on fire in Damascus, the Danish embassy was torched in Beirut, firebombs were hurled at the Danish consulate in Tehran, and Danish and Norwegian flags were burned in Nigeria and Algeria. In the past, an attack on an embassy would have been reason enough to go to war. But this time the affected countries did their utmost to "de-escalate." The victims were repentant and begged the perpetrators for forgiveness. Indeed, the West was intent on not doing anything that could possibly give offense and cause these fanatical Muslims to become even angrier. Objectively speaking, the cartoon controversy was a tempest in a teacup. But subjectively it was a show of strength and, in the context of the "clash of civilizations," a dress rehearsal for the real thing. The Muslims demonstrated how quickly and effectively they can mobilize the masses, and the free West showed that it has nothing to counter the offensive -- nothing but fear, cowardice and an overriding concern about the balance of trade. Now the Islamists know that they are dealing with a paper tiger whose roar is nothing but a tape recording. Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (10 Photos) As different as the West's reactions to the Muslim protests were, what they had in common were origins in feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. Critical souls who only yesterday agreed with Marx that religion is the opium of the masses suddenly insisted that religious sensibilities must be taken into account, especially when accompanied by violence. The representatives of open societies reacted like the inhabitants of an island about to be hit by a hurricane. Powerless against the forces of nature, they stocked up on supplies, nailed doors and windows shut and hoped that the storm would soon pass. Of course, whereas such a reaction may be an appropriate response to natural disasters, such a lack of resistance merely encourages fundamentalists. It completely justifies their view of the West as weak, decadent and completely unwilling to defend itself." Etc, etc, etc.

Good Coffee:tup: Precious Boutique Coffee Fetish Culture Buy it, drink it, and STFU.

1."chavez seems like a pretty hip dude to me." 2. Which is why its hilarious that you of all people would describe my personal convictions as "authoritarian." That help?

That's rich coming from a charter member of the Chavista fan-club.

I said, "there are people in favor of" suing the companies out of existence. Words have meanings. The meanings of the phrases "there are people in favor of" and "there are" are not equal. You are directing a weak jibe at a point that I did not actually make. Clever fellow.

"If the level of violence against women is essentially the same in Muslim and non-Muslim countries (which you haven't come up with any statistics or attempt to disprove, probably because you can't) then your argument devolves to "Violence against women in Muslim countries is bad, but it's OK when we do it in the west" That's a big if, which you are no more able to prove with statistics than I am to refute it with statistics, unless you are prepared to say that the statistics concerning such violence that come out of Sudan et al are as robust and reliable as those coming out of the West, which is a transparently absurd claim. The reason why you have persistently avoided my *actual* argument, and chose to rebut points that you are pretending that I made instead, because you realize that you cannot under any circumstances make a factually correct, logically sound, or sane argument on behalf of the notion that Islam as an institution - which recognizes no distinction between the religious and the secular, nor the societies that its adherents have produced have produced a legal or cultural environment in which women enjoy anything like the rights and freedoms that are guaranteed throughout West. Your claim that violence against women in the West has anything like the legal or cultural sanction that it enjoys under Sharia law is as transparently false as the claim that two plus two equals five. Yes, there's violence against women everywhere, but the cultural and legal prohibitions against it vary massively from one culture to the next, and there is no other world-culture that I am aware of in which grown men feel that it is both their cultural and religious duty to murder their daughters or sisters for the simple act of unsupervised contact with the opposite sex in order to restore their family's "honor." Why you choose to ignore this fact, much less argue on behalf of a system of values which embraces this and many other relics from a barbarous past is unclear. The fact that you'd never actually permit any woman you care about to be subject to either the culture or the religion that perpetuates honor-killings says it all, and any blathering you chose to do in defense of either the said culture or the religion means nothing in comparison.

Finnish PM circa 2003 or so, and cut-and-paste.

If you were being like the Economist you'd neither use Jordan as a representative sample of all Muslim lands nor confuse homicides that the state of Jordan could specifically determine were "honor killings" and actually reported as such with the total number of women killed by men for any reason, but that's beside the point. There's a significant difference between random violence between individuals that's a contravention of both the prevailing legal and moral standards, and violence that's sanctioned by both the law, the prevailing culture, or both. Once the Supreme Court or another equivalent body issues a sentence which condemns a woman to being stoned to death for adultery because she can't produce four male witnesses who will testify that the rape was not consensual, then you will have a point. As things stand now, you are left in the position of trying to argue the impossible, which is that the odd state sanctioned stoning-to-death aside, women in Muslim lands enjoy the same level of personal freedoms and legal protection that they do in the West. You are clearly too smart to literally believe that, and I think if you ever impregnate a woman and have a daughter, and had to choose whether she'd be raised in a Western country and subject to Western law and tradition, or raised in a Muslim country and subject to Sharia for the rest of the life, there's no doubt about what you'd choose, so you are clearly just making an insincere argument on behalf of Islam's treatment of women to satisfy some other impulse or agenda.

Not much hope for that if there's people who are in favor of suing alcohol and tobacco companies out of existence - despite the fact that the risks have been none to anyone who is not literally retarded for over four decades, and both have been perfectly legal for far longer - is there? This is at least as much of an obstacle as the moralistic barriers to legalizing drugs. Not sure that Euroland is the best model for all freedoms, considering the restrictions on speech, firearms, etc that persist there.

But Off, if having a female head-of-state was the best manner in which to asses the legal, political, and cultural status of women in a given society, then we'd have to conclude that Pakistan is on par with Finland, since they've both only had one. You might even have to cede the contest to Pakistan, because Bhutto held office before Jäätteenmäki.

Sounds like that'd be a pretty sure fire way to score some red-hot meth-fueled man-lovin', so long as you're the pastor.

There was certainly no demand for alcohol or alcoholism anywhere in the world before the advent of the modern media. Take away advertising and there'd be no demand for anything. Actually, I think if you account for all of the homicides perpetrated by the various cartels and their hit-men in the countries where the drugs are produced, you'd see a significant reduction in the number of homicides in those countries. Not to mention dramatically reducing the effects of narco-corruption and intimidation on law enforcement, politicians, and the judiciary in those states.

Women aren't abused in Canada? Per your argument, the fact that women are abused in Canada - but the practice is both illegal and universally considered abhorrent - makes Canadian women no better off than their Saudi counterparts? Scroll down the list of rights and freedoms that women throughout the West enjoy and compare that to the list under Sharia and you've got a pretty even ledger there. Here's but one example: "A pregnancy as a result of rape first of all counts as evidence of adultery committed by the woman. The rape victim then has to prove that she really was raped. In case the man - which is very likely - denies that he has raped the woman, the woman has to name four male witnesses to prove the rape. In case the woman does not find these four male witnesses - which again is very likely - she will be charged with slander. For the crime of slander, shari'ah prescribes a punishment of 80 lashes. On top of that, the woman will be charged with adultery, and is thus threatened with the death penalty, if she is married. In case, she is unmarried, the "adultery" counts as immoral behaviour and is punished with 100 lashes. This is at least what the criminal code of January 2000 of the Nigerian state Zamfara says." So per your line of reasoning, if you had a wife or sister or any other woman that you cared about who was raped and became pregnant, and you had to decide whether her case would be subject to Western jurisprudence or Sharia, you might as well flip a coin because there's really no moral or practical difference between the two.

Number one. Not being a young woman in a predominantly Muslim country. " By SHAFIKA MATTAR, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 25, 7:38 AM ET AMMAN, Jordan - A Jordanian man fatally shot his 17-year-old daughter whom he suspected of having sex despite a medical exam that proved her chastity, an official said Thursday. The man surrendered to police hours after the killing, saying he had done it for family honor. A state forensic pathologist, who works at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Amman where an autopsy was performed, said in a phone interview that the girl had run away from home several times for unknown reasons. Weeks ago, the girl had returned home from a family protection clinic after doctors had vouched for her virginity and the father had signed a pledge not to harm her, the pathologist said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case. "The tests proved that she was a virgin," the pathologist said. The girl returned home only after her father signed a statement promising not to harm her, he added. The father shot the girl four times in the head on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an autopsy was performed that again showed "she was still a virgin," the pathologist said. Authorities have not disclosed the names of the father or the daughter or even their hometown, saying only that they lived in a southern province. The crime is the first "honor killing" this year in Jordan, where many men consider sex out of wedlock to be an almost indelible stain on a family's reputation. On average, about 20 women in the country are killed by their relatives in such cases each year. Women have been killed for simply dating. Global human rights organizations have condemned such killings and appealed to King Abdullah II to put an end to them. In response, the government has abolished a section in the penal code that allowed for "honor" killers to get sentences as lenient as six months in prison. Instead, the government has told judges to consider honor killings on a par with other homicides, which in Jordan are punishable by up to 15 years in jail. But attempts to introduce harsher sentences have been blocked by conservative lawmakers who argue that tougher penalties would lead to promiscuity. Queen Rania also has called for harsher punishment for such killers."

That's better.

Sounds like you are getting a bit aggressive here, Chuck. Perhaps you should log-out and start using the Al_Pine avatar. Step back from the keyboard and dream of a society where the government has the power to outlaw all images of skinny models and fast-food. You'll feel better.

Just from the way you typically react anytime anyone questions whether or not a new law that's been conceived to benefit the public will A) actually do so B) may not have other undesirable consequences that far outweigh the proposed benefit. That and the reaction that ensues anytime someone suggests that any of the myriad of personal problems - from obesity to addiction - originate in the actions of the afflicted. This is my perception of you based on your comments here over the course of several years. You are free to dispute it. Selling heroin to consenting adults is entailed within the "complete legalization of all drugs" statement.

Tvash is on a roll today. Nice to see some fusion between the old-school classical liberalism and it's modern American counterpart from time to time. It causes me great pain to see that folks like Chuck get to call themselves liberals when what they believe represents the polar opposite of the beliefs that the philosophy of Liberalism was founded upon. I guess that socialist-state-interventionist doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily, but it would be nice if there were an accurate shorthand term for this kind of a person that didn't misappropriate a name that had its origins in a philosophy that I'm fond of.

So it seems like the Chuck position is that if one is against one form of government intrusion - like the granting the government the right to control what you can say without being imprisoned - one must be against any government regulation of anything, because no freedoms are any more vital or worthy of rational protection in a free society than others. If you oppose legal sanctions that restrict speech, then you are thereby obligated to oppose restrictions on murder, because that too involves the government restriction on the scope of your freedoms, and per your argument you can't oppose restrictions on one without opposing restrictions on the other without contradicting yourself. Am I misreading you here, or is there more to the argument that you repeat over-and-over-and-over whenever anyone suggests that there are reasonable limits to the scope of the government's power? Related point: I am all for complete legalization of all drugs, for prostitution, etc. IMO anything that a mentally competent adult chooses to do to themselves, or anything that two or more mentally competent adults consent to do to one another should be legal. The point at which the public has any say in this begins once it is no longer occurring within a private space. There's no law against being naked in your own home, there are laws against being naked in public. There is no essential contradiction between believing that all private consensual behavior that only affects the participants should be legal, and that it's within the proper scope of the government's power to place restraints on what you are free to do once you leave your own home or other private space, or on your interactions with non-consenting parties. In this arena, some restrictions are vital to preserving liberty, others are detrimental to it, so one can support the former and object to the latter without there being any fundamental inconsistency whatsoever. With regards to the harmful potential of pharmaceuticals, I can get my hands on thousands of harmful compounds at the hardware store, but the fact I don't snort Drano has nothing to do with whether or not it's legal. I see no reason to believe that the entire country would rush in and start mainlining fentanyl if there weren't laws in place to prevent it.

Exactly. There are two things that concern me about this kind of legislation and the thinking that animates it. The first concerns the rights of consenting adults to voluntarily engage in activities that others might find distasteful or dangerous for their tastes. Professional jockeys, bull-riders, porn-stars, NFL Linemen, climbers, boxers, ballerinas, sword-swallowers, and members of a gazillion other professions assume certain risk and voluntarily subject their bodies to risks and hazards and strains in the course of earning a living that neither you nor I might want to adopt ourselves. Should we enable the state to outlaw all such occupations on account of the harm that could come to others who might be influenced by becoming aware of their actions? Is the benefit of protecting mentally competent people against their own decisions equal to the cost of enabling the state to restrict private functions in order to secure some nebulous public benefit? We aren't talking about public goods here. If anything is private, it is your body, and the arguments that center on governing things like roads and highways and airports just don't apply here. If you are a jockey and you can't make weight, it's time to find another profession. If you are an NFL lineman and want to slim down to 180, time to retire. If you are a model and can't or don't want to look the way the person paying you expects, find a different employer or find a different profession. The other problem with this kind of legislation is that it won't have any meaninful impact on the problem. It's easy to point fingers at the media, but pretending the shoving all images of extremely thin women down the memory hole is going to protect young women who are susceptible to anorexia or bullemia is pure fantasy. They'll certainly never notice the thin women around them, and I'm sure that it will escape their notice that thin, fit women seem to get alot more attention from men. Better find ways to legislate against these realities as well, not to mention domineering parents, competitive school environments, etc, etc, etc. Meanwhile, there's another eating disorder that affects millions more people, that will impose far greater costs on society and on the individuals who suffer from it. It's about time to pretend that we can legislate that one away too. Let's ban all images of high calorie food, let the government mandate what we can eat, and pretend that something outside of ourselves is ultimately responsible for our obesity or lack thereof. That'll surely solve the problem.